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Sometimes you can anticipate the big questions that future historians will ponder over. Questions like why did the Scottish electorate vote against independence in the 2014 referendum? Why did VHS win out over Betamax? (You’re showing your age if you even understand that one). Or why did so many people buy into the whole Twilight ‘twinkly vampire’ thing?

There are other questions that will doubtless occur to academics in the future that we can’t possibly anticipate. To take an example, just think of the way that contemporary historians would dearly love to understand the experience of ordinary people from past ages. This is something that the people who were actually recording events at the time totally failed to anticipate, hence the frustration of contemporary historians and their absolute delight at coming across treasures such as the Vindolanda tablets. (Hundreds of wooden leaf-tablets dating from the 1st/2nd Centuries AD, written with carbon based ink. They were found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda – hence the name. Some record official military matters, others are private messages, including invitations to a birthday party and letters written by Roman squaddies to their mums).

Having said that, one question that I can be reasonably sure will never trouble any academic of any discipline in any future period is the vexed conundrum of why the hell I bother to self publish on Amazon Kindle Direct.

The reason I can be so sure about this is because one of two things will happen.

Either a) I will become a hugely successful author in which case it will be obvious to everyone that my efforts to self-publish were all part of a cunning plan that worked out beautifully in the end or b) no one will ever bother to read any of my work, which means that no one will ever hear of me and future academics will be spared the trouble of wondering why I ever did anything at all. (I must admit that the second possibility seems rather more plausible at present).

Of course there is the possibility that future historians will ponder the question of why people in general ever published anything on KDP and its equivalents, but that’s a different and rather more general question.

In the spirit of generosity towards future academics, however, and just on the off-chance that I’m wrong and someone does take an interest in this question, I’m willing to offer an explanation.

The reason why I publish on Amazon KDP is because I’ve never managed to persuade anyone remotely connected with the publishing business to take any interest in publishing anything for me.

There are probably sound reasons for this.

Undoubtedly, one of these reasons is that some of the stuff I’ve sent off to magazines, publishers and agents was, quite frankly, crap. Or at least it was immature and not particularly well thought out or well written. (More to the point, they weren’t particularly well rewritten. The essence of good writing is rewriting – as many of us come to learn).

I had confidence in what I had written at the time, obviously. I wouldn’t have sent it off otherwise. But having reread the material some time later, I could certainly see flaws that weren’t apparent to me when I sent it off.

I suppose that’s inevitable. We all develop over time and the only way to learn to write is to keep writing and keep reading. (In particular that means rereading your own stuff in spite of the fact that it makes you cringe. Or rather, precisely because it makes you cringe. That’s how you learn to avoid writing stuff that makes you cringe).

So clearly some of my submissions have been somewhat (shall we say) optimistic, and with hindsight I can’t really blame anyone for rejecting them.

More recently I think my work has improved and I can go back to it months, and even years later and still not cringe. But I still can’t persuade anyone to take it on.

Maybe that just means that I’m still writing crap and I’ve just become more cunning in deceiving myself. On the other hand, I have had a few positive comments from people who really didn’t need to make any comment at all if they didn’t want to. (As opposed to friends and family who often find it really hard to tell you that you really ought to take up knitting or stamp collecting instead of writing because you’re really not very good at it. I know about this. I was once asked to give ‘an honest opinion’ about some truly appalling poetry and I too found it very hard to be really honest about it).

Of course on one level it really doesn’t make much difference whether or not I’m any good at writing. I don’t write because I think I’m good at it, I write because it’s just something I’m compulsive about doing.

(Someone once said that an artist isn’t someone who’s good at art, he/she is simply someone who would go completely crazy if they tried to stop making art. I have no delusions about being an ‘artist’, but I think the same basic principal applies).

So I’ll carry on writing whether or not I’m writing crap and, like most people who write, I’d be rather pleased if someone actually chose to read something I’ve written. (As opposed to being semi-obliged because I’ve asked them to). As a result I publish stuff on Amazon KDP because I really don’t have a better alternative right now.

Of course the big problem with this form of self-publishing is exactly the same as the big advantage with it. That is, anyone can do it. And of course, because anyone can, lots of people do.

Of course this is the point where some people will be inclined to comment on the quality of the material being published in this way and those comment will inevitably be pretty negative.

I don’t propose to make that kind of comment (mostly because I’m probably in a bit of a glass house here and I shouldn’t start chucking stones about, but also because I’m acutely aware of the fact that my personal opinions aren’t necessarily a reliable guide to literary merit. I could give you quite a long and impressive list of great works of literature that I’ve found unreadable).

Having said that, one point I would make is that the sheer volume of what’s available does make it very difficult to stand out from the ground and make any kind of connection with anyone who might be interested in my writing. (And there is also the fact that my shortcomings as a writer, however great they may be, are as nothing compared to my shortcomings as a self-publicist).

There’s kind of an irony here, by the way. People like me really need an agent to promote our work, because we’re just not very good at promoting it ourselves. But the key to getting an agent is actually self-promotion – you have to ‘sell’ yourself and your work to the agent before they’ll even consider trying to sell it for you.

Of course, however exasperated aspiring authors may be with agents and publishers, the plain fact is that agents and publishers seem to be every bit as exasperated with aspiring authors. And they will, of course, deny that they’re the villains of the piece.

They’ll tell you, instead, that they’re not in it for the money, but because they really love promoting the work they believe in. Then they’ll typically complain about their ‘slush pile’ and probably chuck in a few disparaging remarks about how, contrary to popular belief, there really isn’t some huge pool of unpublished talent out there and the reason why most unpublished authors are unpublished is because they’re unpublishable. You may even get some comment about the prevalence of ‘hypergraphia’ amongst contributors to the slush pile.

(Hypergraphia – a behavioural condition characterised by a compulsive need to write, which may be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy. In this context there’s always the implication that the material being written is incoherent, or at least totally devoid of any literary merit).

There may be some truth in this, I wouldn’t know, I have no way of assessing the quality (or lack thereof) in the unsolicited submissions received by agents and publishers. What I would say, however, is that I really wish some of the people who make these complaints would try working a shift in a call centre or maybe try stacking shelves for a few hours.

Aside from anything else I really believe that, as a result of this experience, they would start to view their slush piles with some genuine affection. (And maybe even show a little bit of respect for the effort other people put into their work – although this may be just a little too much to ask).

I suppose this brings me to a fantasy that, I think, is very common amongst aspiring writers.

It goes like this.

An aspiring author (insert yourself here if you’ve ever written anything and hoped to get it published) writes something wonderful. He/she sends it off to multiple agents and publishers and is refused at every turn.

Finally through sheer persistence (or possibly some lucky chance – depending on your temperament, I suppose) this wonderful piece of writing gets published and becomes a massive worldwide success. At this point all the mean, nasty agents and publishers who rejected it are all summarily dismissed from their posts. (Or at the very least severely embarrassed at their lack of insight).

I can see the attractions of this fantasy, but it is, of course, nonsense.

Anyone who pays attention to such things can cite numerous cases of incredibly successful work that was rejected time and time again. And one thing I think I can be pretty sure of is that none of the people who rejected those works was ever disciplined, or fired, or even criticised for rejecting them.

In publishing, as in so many ‘creative’ fields, the tendency is always to be risk averse and the risk is always in accepting things, never in rejecting them. You may well hear, or read, about agents etc yearning for something original that will break the mould and break new ground and so on and so forth, but if you actually give them anything like that they will immediately start to panic about how it will break the bank if they try to work with it.

The art of making money in any ‘creative’ industry is to avoid being too creative. Essentially you need to follow the herd but try to follow from just a little (a very little) bit in front.

As a consequence, you’re much more likely to suffer as a result of accepting something that fails than for rejecting something that turns out to be a huge success in someone else’s hands.

So, it seems, the only way to be sure of getting something published is to a) be personally acquainted with someone in the publishing business, b) to have already had something published or c) to already be famous for something else. In other words to be a known quantity and to, therefore, seem like a safe bet. (Not that there is such a thing as a truly safe bet – Pippa Middleton’s book on entertaining quite famously failed to sell in any great numbers).

Since I fall into none of the above categories, and I don’t expect I ever will, I have no high hopes of finding an agent, far less a publisher in any big hurry.

As a result I self publish on Amazon KDP, along with so many other people of varying degrees of skill and talent. And I have about the same degree of success as everyone else. And it’s just as well I have a day job.

(Actually I’m working on a night shift at the moment, but the same basic principal applies).